Tag Archives: Libraries

We’ve been wanting to have a try at teaching a captive adult audience for a while, and the Portobello Book Festival seemed like an ideal opportunity. Today we held a three hour class on ‘Making Comics’, where we loosely covered themes of character creation, telling stories with words and pictures, and self publishing. It was a deliberately quiet event – we were teaching a group of five individuals, each of whom had signed up in advance for the three hour session.

Things went really well overall. We deployed our usual character creation games, but did so in a much more focused way. After a short period we’d compare our creations and then move on to the next task, meaning we could all share our experiences, and get inspiration off of each other.

A new game we used was one introduced to me in Ivan Brunetti’s fantastic ‘Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice’ book. The idea is that you have to draw a series of characters read out by the teacher – each one an archetype – but each drawing is only given at most 10 seconds attention. The idea is to portray a character in as efficient a way as possible, whilst still getting across some personality. The game was tough to say the least, especially for those of us maybe a bit more rusty at such quick drawing. But it was fun, informative and really great practice.

We followed all this up with a wall comic. In this case we each drew our own interpretation of a second panel to in the initial panel (in which an angry woman finds her husband drunk in the pub). We then each had to draw a third panel in response to another person’s second panel, and so forth. It meant that we each had a say in how each story line went, and as a whole got to see how a narrative can spiral off in interesting directions from relatively humble beginnings.

The event was great, and a real learning experience. We clearly need to come up with more games for a 3 hour session as things lagged a bit at the end, but overall everyone seemed to have a good time. Hopefully there will be more adult focused comics classes for us in the future!

Thanks to Porty library for being so accommodating, and to our wonderful participants!

The Edinburgh League of Comics is pleased to present ‘Drop in and Draw’, an informal comics drawing event for kids and adults alike!

This free event, held on Saturday 7th of May in celebration of Free Comic Book Day, gives you the opportunity to hang out and draw with amateurs and professionals. Gain insight from our resident Manga expert Fumio Obata, our webcomic whiz Tom Hunt, or our non-fiction specialist Edward Ross. Play comics creation games like Panel Scrabble and ComicJam, create your own Comics Remix, or just spend an afternoon drawing whatever you like!

We provide the paper and pens (though bring your own if you want), you provide the inspiration.

The event is being hosted by Newington Library, Edinburgh. Drop in any time between 1pm and 4.30pm on Saturday 7th May and join the fun! For more details contact Newington Library on 0131 529 5536 or email the ELC atedinburghleagueofcomics@gmail.com